Kraft Programmable Food - With Nano-Capsules!

Have you ever gone to the store and found yourself unable to make a choice? Kraft is working on programmable food; you can buy it at the store, and then decide what color and flavor you want later.

Processed-food giant Kraft and a group of research laboratories are working on a colorless, tasteless drink (don't they already have those?) that is full of nano-capsules of flavor and nutrients. Each nano-capsule is two thousand times narrower than a human hair.

When you get home, you put it in a specially designed microwave that will activate only those nano-capsules that you want to disgorge their contents into the substrate beverage. The remaining nano-capsules will pass harmlessly through your system.

Sounds great, doesn't it? What could possibly go wrong.

As futuristic as this may be, I've seen this future before. In his 1997 story Solace, British sf writer Jeff Noon wrote about programmable soda - spook.

...I'd chosen the six flavours of the drink, realised that the kid addicted to the stuff would call all six flavours mixed together a special name. I thought of taking the six initial letters of the fruits, making a new word out of them. All I could come up with was something like Solcal, the second L coming from Lime, I think. Of course, when I put the story through the Spellchecker, it comes up on this strange word, and asks me if I want to replace it with Solace. So of course I said yes! All I had to do now was find a fruit that began with the letter E, came up with elderberry, and that was it, the story made infinitely better through the use of technology!
(Read more about Jeff Noon's spook programmable soda)

He also had a much more trustworthy-sounding way to implement it. If you'd like to try a real-world version of programmable soda (Kraft is a bit late to the table with this one), take a look at Ipifini's Programmable Soda.